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 Posted: Thu Sep 01, 2005 9:39 am
My mother got me this book for my 21st birthday two months ago, I've just started working my way through it, as it's one of a few books I'm reading and it's quite thick.
In reading it some of the information has caused me to think, or shocked me. I would like to share some of the pieces that did with you here.
If they intrigue you, please take a look at the book from whichever library nearby you that has it, there is far more information in here then I can ever hope to copy down for you all.
She isn't a man-hater, she's not a bra-burning feminist, she simply believes we don't love ourselves enough, and that the struggle for equalism is far from completed.
I'll add new paragraphs as I come across them.
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Posted: Thu Sep 01, 2005 9:43 am
Paragraph entitled: 'Our cultural Inherritance' Western civilization has rested for the last five thousand years on the mythology of patriarchy, the authority of men and fathers. If, as Jamake Highwater says, "all human beliefs and activities spring from an underlying mythology," then it is easy to make the conection that if your culture is totally "ruled by the father," our view of our female bodies and even our medical system also follow male oriented rules. Yet patriarchy is only one of many systems of social organization. Even so, we will not be able to create another kind of social organization until we heal ourselves in our own culture. I have been in the delivery room countless times when a female baby is born and the woman who has just given birth looks up at her husband and says. "Honey, I'm sorry" --apologizing because the baby is not a son! The self-rejection of the mother herselv, apologizing for the product of her own nine-month gestation period, labor, and delivery, is staggering to experience. Yet when my own second daughter was born, I was shocked to hear those very words of apology to my husband come right up into my brain from the collective unconscious of the human race. I never said them out loud, and yet they were there in my head -- completely unbidden. I realized how old and ingrained is this rejection of the female by men and women alike! Our culture gives girls the message that their bodies, their lives, and their femaleness demand an apology. Have you notived how often women apologize? I was walking down the street recently when a man ran into a woman who was walking by, causing her to drop a package. She apologized profusely. Somewhere deep inside many of us is an apology for our very existence. As Anne Wilson Schaef writes, "The original sin of being born female is not redeemable by works." No matter how many degrees you get in college, no matter how many awards you earn, somehow you can never measure up. If we must apologize for our very existence fromt he day we are born, we can assume that our society's medical system will deny us the wisdom of our "second-class" bodies. In essence, patriarchy blares out the message that women's bodies are inferior and must be controlled. Our culture habitually denies the insidiousness and pervasiveness of sex-related issues. I first learned in my medical practice that abuse against women is epidemic, whether subtle or overt. And I saw how abuse sets the stage for illness in our female bodies. Consider the following: A study by Dr.Gloria Bachmann estimates that up to 38 percent of adult women in the United States have been sexually abused as children. This made me angry, physically angry, but mostly it was just confirming what I'd already suspected. Quote: Because failure to report abuse is common, only 20 to 50 precent of these incidents ever come to the attention of authorities, so the percentage may be even higher. Some of us literally don't remember it, as it was traumatic enough for our minds to block the memories out almost completely, so that our immediate consciousness is not aware of them, as a method of psychological protection. I wonder if that man who put his hands down my pants at a Christmas party ever did anything worse, either ot me, or to another girl who was there, as I remember she changed at one point and was far more withdrawn and no one knew why. It angers me so much, and I intend to look further into my memories with help and see if I can't uncover and even perhaps expose that b*****d for what he may have done to me and my peers. Quote: A woman living in the United States has a one-in-three chance of being raped in her lifetime, and 50 percent of all married women will be battered at least once in their marriages. Frightening. Quote: The research of Dr Leah Dickstein has documented that spousal abuse is the cause for one out of two suicide attempts among black women and one of four suicide attempts among white women. Research done by World Watch Institute's Lori Hesse points out that throughout the world, four times as many girls die of malnutrition as boys because food is given preferentially to boys. In China, it is reported, 140,000 girls are abandoned or put up for adoption evey two weeks. According to the United Nations Report on the Status of Women, women do two-thirds of the world's work for one-tenth of the world's wages, yet they own less then one one-hundredth of the world's property. The landmark study of gender bias in American schools by the American Association of the University Women confirmed an earlier report that compared to girls, boys are five times as likely to revieve the most attention from teachers and eight times as likely to call out in class. Directly quoted, every capitol, every comma, every word.
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Posted: Thu Sep 01, 2005 10:19 am
Paragraph entitled: Patriarchy Results in Addiction' The Judeo-Christian cosmology that informs Western civilization sees the female body and female sexuality in the person of Eve as responsible for the downfall of mankind. For thousands of years, women have been beaten, abused, burned at the stake, and blamed for all manner of evil simply because of their sex. We forget, in this era of rapid change, that women did not even win the right to vote until 1920! In 1953, in her book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvior wrote, "Man enjoys the great advantage of having a god endorse the code he writes. And since man exercises a sovereign authority over women it is especialy fortunate that this authority has been vested in him by the Supreme Being. For the Jews, Mohammedans, and Christians among others, man is master by divine right; the fear of God will therefore repress any impulse towards revolt in the downtrodden female." The belief that men are meant to be rulers of women runs deep in many Western traditions. The patriarchal organization of our society demands that women, it's second-class citizens, ignore or turn away from their hopes and dreams in deference to men and the demands of their families. This systematic suffering or denying of our needs for self-expression and self-actualization causes us enormous emotional pain. To stay out of touch with our pain, women have commonly used addictive substances and developed addictive behaviors that have resulted in and endless cycle of abuse that we ourselves help perpetuate. Being abused or abusing ourselves, we become ill. Wehen we become ill, we are treated by a patriarchal medical system that denigrates our bodies. Many of us are not given good medical care or even the same medical care that men recieve for the same illnesses. I'm kind of inclined not to agree with that, I have no evidence proving or disproving what she's saying, but I can't see doctors, or women doctors, being sexist enough to deprive someone of proper medical care based on their gender O.o Quote: So we often become sicker or develop chronic health problems, for which the medical establishment has no answers or treatments. This is the cycle that characterizes our current medical care. And increasingly, women are finding that driving to succeed "like a man" also puts our bodies at risk. Anne Wilson Schaef writes that "anything can be used addictively, whether it be a substance (like alcohol) or a process (like work). Or in my case, cleaning and trying to keep everyone happy xd Quote: This is because the purpose or function of an addicton is to put a buffer between ourselves and our awareness of our feelings. I wholeheartedly agree, I have done it many times, and still occasionally resort to it in an attempt to cope with all that is overwhelming me. Quote: An addiction serves to numb us so that we are out of touch with what we know and what we feel." Yet the good news is that when we acknowledge and release our emotional pain, we are put immediately in touch with our feelings, which can act as our iner guidance system. Clearly, we need a new kind of medical attitude and wisdom that helps put us in touch with our inner pain as the first step toward healing. Seeing the connection between addiction and patriarchy has been key in my understanding of the patterns behind women's major health problems. The word patriarchy, unfortunately, is usually accompanied by blaming men, but blame is one of the key behaviors that keeps people stuck in systems that harm them. Seeing this written allowed me to acknowledge that, I knew it, but it's not easy to practice, that someone else knew it too made it easier to incorporate into my daily thoughts. Quote: Neither women, nor men, nor society as a whole can move on and heal as long as one sex blames the other. We have to decide to move on, to leave blame behind us. Both men and women perpetuate the system in which we live with our daily addictive behaviors and attitudes. By renaming patriarchy "the addictive system," Schaef has advanced our understanding of society's problems dramatically. She demonstrates that the way our society functions is harmful to both men and women and that both genders participate fully in this system. I am grateful to her for her insights, on which I draw throughout this book. Renaming patriarchy "the addictive system" and seeing the ways in which this system is harmful to both men and women in no way undermines the importance of feminism and it's perspectives. That these perspectives have made important contributions to medical thinking was brought home to me when, right after my residency, I found thefollowing listing in the index of the 1980 edition of the venerable textbook Williams Obstetrics: "Chauvinim, male, variable amounts of, pages 1-1102" --the length of the entire book. Quote: What editor or indexer had inserted this entry in anonymous protest? We will probably never know. I favor Sonia Johnson's definition of feminism because it contains a vision of healing within it: "Feminism is the articulation of the ancient, underground culture and philosophy based on the values that patriarchy has labeled 'womanly' but which are necessary for the full humanity. Among the principles and values of feminism that are most distinct from those of patriarchy are universal equality, non-violent problem-solving, and cooperation with nature, one another, and other species." !
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Posted: Thu Sep 01, 2005 10:53 am
Paragraph entitled: Belief Three: The Female Body Is Abnormal Because being male is considered the norm in the addictive system, most women internalize the idea that something is basically "wrong' with their bodies. They are led to believe that they must control many aspects of their bodies and that their natural odors and shapes are simply unacceptable. Women are socialized to theink that their bodies are essentially dirty -- requiring constant surveillance for "freshness" so that we don't "offend." Females naturally have more body fat then men, and because of better nutrition than in past decades, women today are also bigger then were thier mothers and grandmothers. Even while reading this, something inside me is calling out 'No no! That's wrong! I'm not large! I'm properly small and feminine because that's what's desirable! Really!!' xp I look at that and go, 'geeze she's right, this stuff is absolutely engrained!' Quote: Yet the average fashon model, our cultural ideal, weighs 17 percent less then the average American woman. No wonder anorexia nervosa and bulimia are ten times more common in females then in males and are on the rise. This denigration of the female body has made many women either afraid of their bodies and their natural processes or else disgusted by them. Do you look in the mirror and feel nothing but love for yourself and what you see? Or, as I have done, look and see only things you wish weren't shaped the way they were, or were smaller, or larger, or not there at all? Quote: Many never touch or get to know what their breasts feel like, for instance, because they're afraid of what they might find. They may feel guilty for touching them, equating this with masturbation, since breasts are erotic for men -- another sign of how thoroughly we have turned our bodies over to men. At first I react with 'that's a sexist thing to say!' and then I think, 'wait, she's got a really good point... we spend so much time dressing ourselves up in an effort to make ourselves more appealing to males, we're often depressed when we're single as it might make it look like we're not desirable, we paint ourselves and attempt to conform ourselves into what we think a male would like. I know very few women who dress comfortably, be it baggy clothes, or fancier ones, just for themselves, to be comfortable and happy about it.' It feels good to look good, but if those shoes cut into your heals or give you corns, or if that concealer is clogging your pores, and if underwire bra's cut off lymph node drainage and circulation, causing a build up of toxins that can lead to breast cancer, then why do we wear all this stuff!? Quote: Health practitioners and women alike view even normal bodily functons such as menstruation, menopause, and childbirth as medical conditions requiring treatment. The attitude that our bodies are accidents waiting to happen seems to get internalized at a young age and sets the stage for women's future relationships with their bodies. Given what we are taught, it is no wonder that most of us feel ill prepared to deal with and trust ourselves. Our bodies have been "medicalized" since before we were born! Our culture fears all natural processes: birthing, dying, healing, living. Daily, we are taught to be afraid. When my older daughter was seven, she was out with her father chopping down some brush in our backyard. Suddenly she started to cry and came running into the house with a bleeding finger. She had cut herself on a blade of grass. As I calmly held her finger under some cold water and saw that it was only a tiny cut, she looked up at me and uttered what I consider a major healing principle: "It didn't hurt until I got scared." Because our culture worships science and believes that it is "objective," we think that everything labeled "scientific" must be true. We believe that science will save us. But science as it is currently practiced is a cultural construct rife with all the biases of the addictive system in general. There is actually no such thing as completely objective data. Cultural bias determines which studies we believe and which we ignore. No one is immune to this behavior. We all have our sacred cows. A presenter at a medical conference once said "The human mind is an organ uniquely designed to create antibodies against new ideas." Many procedures routinly performed on women's bodies in particular are not based on scientific data at all but are rooted in prejudice against the body's innate wisdom and healing power. Many procedures have their origins in emotional views of women handed down from previous generous. Routine episiotomies at delivery (cutting the tissue between the v****a and the rectum, which allegedly makes more room for the baby's head) are an example. Recent studies have shown that episiotomies increase blood loss, pain, and risk of long-term pelvic floor damage, something midwives have been saying for years. Episiotomy was and often still is done at delivery simply because obstetricians who do it are certain it protects the pelvic floor from injury. Obstetricians have only recently started to question the advisability of this routine procedure, as studies have shown that it is not helpful and can even be harmful.
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Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2005 5:29 pm
Quote: Have you notived how often women apologize? I was walking down the street recently when a man ran into a woman who was walking by, causing her to drop a package. She apologized profusely. Somewhere deep inside many of us is an apology for our very existence. Man this really hit me in the face!!! My new boyfriend is constantly telling me to stop apologizing!!! He always says I have nothing to apologize for....... Funny thing is that I can't stop it!!! I just keep saying sorry for things I say or do!!!
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Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 10:17 pm
Thank you Gemstone for this thread.
Please keep posting.
I'm going to be checking this book out, maybe even purchase it.
heart
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Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2005 5:58 pm
Gwyndara Thank you Gemstone for this thread. Please keep posting. I'm going to be checking this book out, maybe even purchase it. heart
I'm so glad to know good is comming of my posting it here heart I'll type up more when I get a chance, most of that is from the intro and the rest of the book contains personal accounts and experiences from many diffrent women, it contains information on the way our bodies work, including (not that seeing a doctor isn't always a good idea alongside) possible reasons for discomfort or unusual aches and pains. 3nodding
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Posted: Fri Sep 23, 2005 8:28 am
Gemstone Paragraph entitled: Belief Three: The Female Body Is Abnormal Many procedures routinly performed on women's bodies in particular are not based on scientific data at all but are rooted in prejudice against the body's innate wisdom and healing power. Many procedures have their origins in emotional views of women handed down from previous generous. Routine episiotomies at delivery (cutting the tissue between the v****a and the rectum, which allegedly makes more room for the baby's head) are an example. Recent studies have shown that episiotomies increase blood loss, pain, and risk of long-term pelvic floor damage, something midwives have been saying for years. Episiotomy was and often still is done at delivery simply because obstetricians who do it are certain it protects the pelvic floor from injury. Obstetricians have only recently started to question the advisability of this routine procedure, as studies have shown that it is not helpful and can even be harmful. a guy i dated last year told me about this prcedure. i'd heard the term, but i never knew wht it meant. i didn't believe him when he told me about, because i found it hard to believe that they would need to modify a birthing system that's worked fine for countless centuries. why someone would doubt such an ancient system is beyond me. like our creator was so clueless as to not equip the givers of life with a method of safely bringing that life into the world.
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Posted: Fri Sep 23, 2005 7:52 pm
Sounds interesting.
I hope she praises women that stay home with their children somewhere in the book though. You don't here that enough, not these days.
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Posted: Fri Sep 23, 2005 7:54 pm
EliMae Gemstone Paragraph entitled: Belief Three: The Female Body Is Abnormal Many procedures routinly performed on women's bodies in particular are not based on scientific data at all but are rooted in prejudice against the body's innate wisdom and healing power. Many procedures have their origins in emotional views of women handed down from previous generous. Routine episiotomies at delivery (cutting the tissue between the v****a and the rectum, which allegedly makes more room for the baby's head) are an example. Recent studies have shown that episiotomies increase blood loss, pain, and risk of long-term pelvic floor damage, something midwives have been saying for years. Episiotomy was and often still is done at delivery simply because obstetricians who do it are certain it protects the pelvic floor from injury. Obstetricians have only recently started to question the advisability of this routine procedure, as studies have shown that it is not helpful and can even be harmful. a guy i dated last year told me about this prcedure. i'd heard the term, but i never knew wht it meant. i didn't believe him when he told me about, because i found it hard to believe that they would need to modify a birthing system that's worked fine for countless centuries. why someone would doubt such an ancient system is beyond me. like our creator was so clueless as to not equip the givers of life with a method of safely bringing that life into the world.
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Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2005 5:21 pm
I haven't read everything posted here however I did read enough to be quite interested in this book and may very well try to buy it. I know I had it written down somewhere.
Another book I would suggest concerning women and our self image is called "No Fat Chicks" by Terry Poulton. She is a good writer, Canadian too (whoohoo!) and I think she did an excellent job with doing her research. It's all about how we in society now see ourselves as fat and how there is so much discrimination etc. Did you know that there are a lot of deaths that are due to over exercising and not eating? More than you'd realize that's for sure. Unfortunately in Canada we haven't gotten to the stage of recording all deaths pertaining to this and so it was hard for her to find the causes of death here in Canada compared to the states where surprisingly enough it's very well recorded.
Unfortunately I don't have the book any longer, I lent it to my sister's bf's mom and then my sister and her bf broke up so now I can't get the book back. sad I so have to get these 2 books for Christmas lol. The one I am suggesting did a great thing for my self esteem and was able to help not only me but help me help others who had low self image concerning their weight.
Anyway that's my 2 cents right now. Doing math homework lol.. gotta get back to it for college. smile
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Posted: Sun Sep 25, 2005 9:02 am
Thank you for this thread. I've beentrying to figure out what to get my boyfriend's sister for christmas, and I think this will be perfect. I appreciate being able to read all of this. Thank you.
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Posted: Sun Sep 25, 2005 10:40 am
heart 's to you all.
Paragraph entitled: 'Energy Anatomy' Though there are distinct diffrences between the energies of the ovaries and those of the uterus, many women have problems in both at the same time. For example, many women whose ovaries are affected by endometriosis also have fibroid tumors in the uterus. It is helpful, therefore, to discuss in general the overall nature of the emotional and psychological energy pattens that create health and disease in the pelvic organs. The internal pelvic organs (ovaries, tubes, and uterus) are related to second-chakra issues. Their health depends upon a woman's feeling able, competent, or powerful to create financial and emotional abundance and stability, and to express her creativity fully. She must be able to feel good about herself and about her relationships with other people in her life. Relationships that she finds stressful and limiting, on the other hand, may adversely affect her internal pelvic organs. Thus, if a woman stays in an unhealthy relationship because she feels she cannot support herself economically or emotionally, her internal pelvic organs may be at increased risk for disease. Disease is not created until a woman feels frustrated in her attempts to effect changes that she needs to make in her life.
Quote: The likelihood and severtity of disease is related to how well the various areas of her life are functioning. A supportive marriage and family life, for example, can partially compensate for a stressful job. A classic psychological pattern associated with physical problems in the pelvis is that of a woman who wants to break free from limiting behaviors in her relationships (with her husband or her job, for example) but who cannot confront her fears about the independence that making that change would bring. Though she may perceive that others are limiting her ability to break free, her major conflict is actually within herself around her own fears. One of my patients developed a fibroid tumor of the uterus and an ovarian cyst when she was forty. I asked her if her need for creativity was being met, and she told me that she very much wanted to leave her job and begin a florist business. She'd been interested in flowers since childhood, but her parents had always discouraged her interest, since they considered it "frivolous." She had dutifully gone along with their suggestion that she learn typing and secretarial skills instead. She eventually became an executive secretary in an accounting firm. Though this work was not satisfying to her, she stayed at her job because it provided her with a steady income and good benefits, and she was afraid of the risks of striking out on her own. As her fortieth birthday approached, she felt the need to persue her childhood passion and had recurrent dreams about fields of flowers that she couldn't get to because they were fenced in by barbed wire. She came to see that through her ovarian cyst and fibroid uterus, her body's birthing center was trying to tell her something. Another issue that affects a woman's pelvic organs is competition amoing her various needs. When her innermost needs for companionship and emotional support are in cometition with her outer needs for success, autonomy, and tribal approval, this situation may manifest in her inner pelvic organs, the ovaries and the uterus. Our culture teaches us that we can't be both emotionally fulfilled and financially successful, and that our needs for them both are mutually exclusive; that as women, we can't have it all. Woman are not usually taught to be competent in handling economic and financial assets because the patriarchal system depends on women being dependent. Since having money and status protects us and makes us feel safe, women have been taught that to find security they have to marry, and men have been taught that they have to provide women with money and social status. Success, in the addictive system, permits us to control others. These beliefs and the controlling behavior theat results from them are a setup for pelvic problems. The uterus is related energetically to a woman's innermost sense of self and her inner world. It is symbolic of her dreams and the selves to which she would like to give birth. It's state of health reflects her inner emotional reality and her belief in herself at the deepest level. the health of the uterus is at risk if a woman doesn't believe in herself or is excessively self-critical.
Quote: Uterine energy is slower then ovarian energy. The biological gestation time for the fetus is nine lunar months, while the biological gestation time for an egg is only one lunar month. Think of the uterus as the soil, either symbolic or biological, in which the creative seeds from the ovaries grow over time. Ovarian enery is more dynamic and quickly changing then that of the uterus. In the reproductive years, healthy ovaries release new seeds monthly in a dynamic way. When this dynamic ovarian enery needs to get our attention, the ovaries are capable of changing very quickly. A large ovarian cyst can grow in a matter of days under the right circumstances. Ovarian health is directly related to the quality of a woman's relationships with the people and things outside herself. Ovaries are at risk when women feel controlled or criticized by others or when they themselves control and criticize others.
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Posted: Sun Sep 25, 2005 10:41 am
Reserved for Paragraph entitled 'Chronic Pelvic Pain'
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Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2005 3:15 pm
This is very interesting info! Thanks for sharing it with us!
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